Salman Abu Sitta Compilation

Salman Abu Sitta: Ethnic cleansing policy was a fundamental principle of Zionism, that we want the land, we do not want the people. I became a refugee when I was in a boarding school about 40 kilometers away from my home place. And in April 1948, the headmaster came to us and said, the Jews are attacking people around Tel Aviv in Jaffa area. They will soon come to our area. I cannot protect you. So you better go home now, quite a bit early, maybe six weeks early, before the end of the scholastic year. and i was about 10 at the time and the distance between the boarding school and my home is about 40 to 60 kilometers depending on how you do it and the road to my home was cut off frequently by zionist soldiers who were riding in jeeps. And the jeeps, I remember clearly, had two machine guns, one pointing forward and the other one pointing backward. And so they would go at terrific speed in the area in which they have no physical presence except they have garrisons of 30 soldiers in certain locations. They would terrify the farmers. And they would drive on the roads and in the fields, and they shoot anybody in sight. So I have a cousin who was older than me, about 20 years age at that time, and he said, let us walk back home. And he advised us that if you see these jeeps coming, you have to hide in the wheat field, which was then very much in evidence, until you hear the sound of the jeep going away. So we did that, and on the way, I had to throw away my bag, you know, my clothes and my books, and we had to walk about 40 kilometers, terrified as a child that One moment we see the Jeep and they would kill us when I arrived home my mother was was so so sad and I I think I remember I had to sleep for about two days after this ordeal Now only six weeks later precisely on the 14th the night of 14th and 15th of May I Our home was attacked again by about 24 tanks, which came to cut Gaza Strip. My home is close to Gaza Strip, but not in Gaza Strip, to cut it into two, to cut Gaza Strip into two. And they came, and we have my brothers and cousins and so on. They had some old guns. They held them from about 10 o'clock at night till 6 o'clock next morning. But finally, of course, they could not continue to resist. And the Zanis came, and they blew up our homes and burned them. They also blew up the school. which my father built in 1920 at a primary school, which was our pride because my father built that school at his expense in 1920 when he had no children. They also blew what's called Bayara, which is a well, a motorized well, from which we drink and also we water our gardens and plantations. Since that time, I spent many, many days and years, in fact, going through Europe, Europe's libraries, especially in London, but also in Paris and in Germany and Istanbul, trying to reconstruct the face of that invisible enemy to me which destroyed my life ever since until today. What did we do to them? I never saw a Jew in my life. I never saw, of course, a Zionist soldier in my life. And I had to construct even not only who they were, but the names of the officers who destroyed my life. I got pictures of them. I got maps of how they made this operation. And through a friend of mine, an Israeli non-Zionist, he interviewed them last year, and he interviewed them one by one, including the officer who actually demolished the house and what they call political commissar who was, you know, indoctrinating the soldiers, and also the intelligence officer. And they told him, yes, we know the name Abu Sitta quite well. We have feared that name because their family is known to control most of the area in that place. And they were the ones resisting the Zionist encroachment since the early days of the mandate. In terms of facts, when the British mandate took office in Palestine, they had the objective of giving Palestinians, the natural majority, free democratic government. At the same time, because of colonial rule, intentions they have given a balfour promise or declaration to establish a national home of jews in palestine it says a national home doesn't say a state it says in palestine not of palestine so during the mandate period They managed only to obtain a total of 5.5% of the area of Palestine and no more, because people will not sell their patrimony, although there has been laws which are discriminatory to the Palestinians. They applied taxes on them to force them to sell land, but even in the end, they could not do more than 5.5% of Palestine. They were able to bring in Jewish immigrants to Palestine so that the Jewish population rose from 9% at the beginning of the mandate to 30 percent at the end of the mandate. And this population was highly militaristic. They selected young men of military age, many of them have been veterans of Second World War, and they managed to put in an army of 120,000 trained soldiers. By comparison, the Palestinians had only home guards of about 20 or 30 in each village a total of which does not exceed 2,500 so it was a foregone conclusion who is going to win and there is of course the fallacy that the Jews were outnumbered by the Arabs this is never true in any battle as now history books show they were outnumbering Palestinians by 4 to 1 so Ben-Gurion made a policy of taking over palestine even before the british left and he managed to expel half of the total refugees before the middle of may 1948 which is the end of the mandate and before the state was established and ironically he expelled the people who are Palestinians, from the state where they are supposed to remain as citizens in the Jewish state. But of course, the ethnic cleansing policy was a fundamental principle of Zionism, that we want the land, we do not want the people. The state of Israel was established on the 14th of May 1948 on 13% of Palestine. So they conquered an extra area from 5.5 to 13%. And at this moment, all the countries which had recognized Israel de facto, in fact, recognized it on only 13%. Later, of course, the Israelis were able to conquer 78% of Palestine. And therefore, theoretically speaking or legally speaking, those who recognize Israel as de facto, They should not have recognized Israel on the extra amount of Palestine which it conquered. The ethnic cleansing was almost complete. 675 towns and villages, Palestinian towns and villages, were depopulated. Only 99 remained. This systematic expulsion was a deliberate one, although there are sometimes arguments whether this is clear in documents or not clear. That is of no relevance because what you should see is what actually happened. The system was like this. They instituted or they committed a massacre at the beginning of every military operation. There has been 30 military operations in 1948 to conquer Palestine. At the beginning of each, there was always a massacre. Der Yassin is the famous or infamous one. But actually, in Dawaima, the people who were massacred by, you know, smashing the baby's heads and so on, were much larger than that. And in the north, in Galilee, there has been tremendous number of massacres. And they used to say, if you don't leave, the fate of such and such village will be yours. And the standard method used was to circle the village from three sides, leaving the fourth open. This fourth side, which remains open, was pointing to Lebanon in the north, so that people go to Lebanon and Syria, and pointing to the east in the central part of Palestine to go to Jordan. And in the south, the open side was to the south, so that they could go to Gaza. The people who were depopulated represented 85% of the Palestinians who lived in the conquered land. Only 15% remained, and we know what happened to them. They are now about a million, and they live even now under second-class status. By July 1949, Israel signed armistice agreements with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. And the armistice line was created. Legally speaking, the armistice line has no value in that it doesn't confer or deny rights to anybody. It simply is the temporary line at which forces stopped on that day. With time, this line became like an international border. But in international law, it is not a border. It's only a temporary line of the cessation of hostilities. Now, this sounds simple when you say it. But in fact, 111 villages have been decimated by this line. Most of them are in the West Bank and others about five or seven in Gaza. Here you see people coming, officers from the United Nations, accompanied by Israeli officers and some Arab officers, whether Jordanian or Egyptian, walking through, cutting through the land of a village and the well or the water supply they have falls on the wrong side or the fields are on the wrong side, or sometimes in villages the line goes through the middle of the village. And people of the village would be crying, screaming, shouting, and say, how come you decimate our land? How come this is our patrimony? How come suddenly this land of mine becomes across the barbed wire? I can't go there. How come we have no water because our water sources are on the wrong side? How come our school and cemetery be outside of our reach? Many people in the world who believe in justice say that the Palestinians, like anybody else, have the right to return home. Because there is nothing more basic than the right to live in your home. The sanctity of private ownership is something sacred. The English call my home is my castle. because that is where one finds security. Not only that, for Palestinians, not only security, but it's the patrimony of the family. It is not uncommon to find families in Palestine named after their villages, like Nablus Nablusi, like Fallujah Fallujah. And their history... I mean, goes back not only during Islam, which is 1400 years ago, not only during Christianity, which is 2000 years ago, but even up to 5000 years ago. There is evidence, strong evidence, that the Palestinians never left Palestine en masse. The only time in the last 5,000 years in which they have been depopulated en masse from Palestine is in 1948. And even then, still half of the Palestinians still live in the land of Palestine. And in fact, 88% of all Palestinians live within 100 miles around Palestine and in Palestine itself. As I have shown in many studies, 97% of the refugees live within 100 kilometers away from their homes, and 50 percent, half of them, live within 40 kilometers, a mere bus ride. And, of course, in Israel itself and in the West Bank, many people see, actually see their homes, and they are not allowed to return to their homes. This anomaly, this grave injustice, could not possibly continue. even though it is now held by the power of the gun and the power of f-16 and the trail of blood and destruction which is happening in palestine and have been happening for 58 years if the palestinians are not strong in their belief in the right to return home they would not have withstood 58 years of wars and destruction and brutal occupation. Nobody, in my knowledge, and to the best of my estimate, nobody could stand that onslaught for 58 years. Civilian people, unarmed people, do not have arms, sophisticated arms, do not have financial support from various countries in the West do not have political support, yet they are adamant in restoring their right to their homes. Why? Because it's part of the making of the human being that you have an identity and you have this identity is tied to your patrimony. People in Palestine know that their parents and grandparents are buried in the same spot. People belong to that place even now, even now. I have seen examples of young people when they get married, they go around the world finding the family which lives down the street and they marry as if the geography has not severed their lives. I have seen examples in New York, for example, when a boy meets a girl and he knows that she is from that village or related somehow, they get married. In other words, they defy the severance of their geography and they maintain continuity of their history. And the return, in fact, is embodied in the simple idea that A nation's history and geography should be united. And now for the Palestinians, they are separated. But that is their quest, to unite their history and geography. Resolution 194, which is very famous among Palestinians, which has been affirmed by the United Nations many times, over a hundred times, says that the Palestinians have the right to retain their homes and in addition they have the right for compensation. It is a simple matter in compensation law that if you cause damage to to anybody, you are obliged to remove that damage or to replace it or to compensate for it. This is a simple fact. It's very well known. When you are driving and you hit somebody's car, you have to pay for it. So in international law, and with the experience of Kosovo and Bosnia and Iraq, the machinery for carrying out the compensation is now well established by the United Nations. What does that mean? It means that you have a personal compensation for material losses. That is to say, they have used your fields and your land for 58 years. They must give you the revenue from this property for all these times. In fact, there is a United Nations resolution which is reaffirmed every year in November, which says the Palestinians are entitled to the revenue of their property for 58 years, and it obliges Israel to put this in a special account pending settlement. That is for the material compensation. Now, people say if somebody doesn't want to return. Now, if they don't want to return, which by all counts will be a minimum number of people, then their property is offered to sale naturally to another Palestinian. then he can buy it from the non-returning refugee. But both of them are entitled to the revenue from their property. and also they are entitled to compensation for repairing of the damage which has taken place. Today as we speak, thousands of Lebanese are forced to leave their homes in south of Lebanon and thousands of Israelis are forced to leave their homes in northern Israel because of hostilities. Nobody would suggest that when the hostilities cease that these people are not allowed to return. So regardless of the reason why refugees left, that is no excuse whatsoever to prevent their return. It's a fallacy used. In fact, we know now it's well established that Ben-Gurion and the Zionist system in 1948 did everything possible to prevent the return of the refugees. First, they shot everyone who dared to go back. They shot them in the spot. They called them infiltrators. Second, they demolished their homes and villages and so on. Third, they burned their crops. They also poisoned their wells. And then they established a political policy saying that we cannot allow the refugees back because they are going to be a fifth column. At the same time, they brought in Jews, firstly from Arab countries who were readily available, to replace them. I have shown in my studies, had the refugees not been expelled from their homes, it would not have been possible for those Jewish immigrants from Arab countries to come to Israel. Because they lived in Arab homes. So if the Arabs are still there, they could not have got them. And therefore, the Arab Jews, we call them Arab Jews, who came from Arab countries, were only able to immigrate to Israel because the Palestinians have been expelled from their homes. Now, the Israelis sometimes say that there should be an international fund to pay compensation for the Palestinian refugees for their property. There is a fallacy in this in many ways. First of all, the compensation is a right for the Palestinians after they return. When they return, everyone will calculate how much damage and loss he suffered, and then compensation can be paid. Palestinians are absolutely united in never accepting compensation as the price of their homes. And they say our homes and country are not for sale. So this principle is rejected totally. Now Israel wants to advance this idea of an international fund in order to resettle the Palestinians anywhere in the world from Lebanon and Jordan to Canada and the United States. They are ready to help the Palestinian refugees settle anywhere in the world except in their homes. As I said, this is definitely rejected. Now, what is the idea of establishing an international fund? Israel's idea is that, as I said, to take over the real estate property of the Palestinians, which comprises 93% of the area of Israel today. It will also take over the property in 675 towns and villages. It will take over all the public amenities in the country and ask someone else to pay for this. And on the condition that Israel will be in the end the legal owner for the Palestinian property paid for by others. And they want to make that a condition such that there will be no demand of Palestinians after that, neither for the return to their homes nor for any other kind of compensation. In other words, Israel would ask the world to pay for all the property and the land it has confiscated from Palestinians, and it will end up by being the legal owner, signed by the original owner himself, that he doesn't have any property anymore, and consider this to be a fair solution. This is far from it and would never be accepted by the Palestinians.

Youssef: Salman Abu Sitta is a Palestinian researcher and writes about Palestinian refugees and the Palestinian right to return to Palestine. He founded and is the president of the London-based Palestine Land Society Dr. Abbasita is a former member of the Palestine National Council. Today he will be discussing his work on a new atlas that spans from 1917 to 1966, including 700 pages of detailed information on British Mandate-era Palestine through the Nakba and beyond, truly an impressive and massive piece of work. The talk is entitled Mapping Palestine for its Survival and Destruction. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Salman Abu Sattar.

Salman Abu Sitta: Dr. Thank you, Youssef. It's a pleasure to see you all here. I arrived from London last night, and our plane was delayed on the tarmac for 30 minutes or an hour, actually, because they told us there are storms in Washington. So I hope, I mean, I'm grateful to you who came here today, although, I mean, even though they have braved this weather. But nice people are always nice, no matter what the weather is like. You must have heard in history the story of the king who conquered many lands. and brought back riches to his country and immortalized his deeds by carving them on a stone monument. Then the next king came and chipped off his name and put his name instead and claimed to be the victor. This forgery and deception are still going on today. only with more sophisticated means and with shady and spurious scholarship to forge and to deceive people about facts. Now, we do not have stone monuments anymore, but we do have charts and maps. The map is long considered to be the birth certificate of a place. It is also the identity of a place. In the last two centuries, maps became an instrument of colonial power to show the extent of their conquest and domination. It was equivalent to planting a flag on a territory, a new territory, and claiming it to be your own. In the late 19th century, the British Empire could boast vast dominions, all colored with pink, covering three-quarters of the world. But nowhere in the world, nowhere in recent history at least, and of course old history, have maps being instrumental in the conquest of a territory than in Palestine. In the 19th century, Palestine was blessed, some people say cursed, by so many travelers, priests, surveyors, spies, and adventurers who charted the Holy Land. A particularly remarkable effort in this is the work done by Palestine Exploration Fund, a British institution in 1865. It was established in 1865, but it worked in Palestine from 1871 for four years, and then four years in London to collate the information and produce the Palestine Exploration Fund survey of Palestine, which came out in 10 volumes and 12,000 names. Although its purpose was to verify the authenticity of the Bible and had little interest in the living people of Palestine, but it remains to be the most important record we have of the 19th century. All this mapping was vital for General Alembi when he started to conquer Palestine in 1917. But in 1917, you know there is Balfour Declaration. And two years after 1917, the Zionists, promoting the myth that Palestine was a land without people and ignoring the well-documented PAF survey, presented with great audacity to the peace conference in Versailles in 1919, this map of Palestine, but not this one particularly, hashed over it over 1,000 towns and villages in Palestine and wrote on it grazing land for nomads and presented this map as a document for Versailles peace conference in order to advance their aim of taking Palestine. It's a land without people. It's a grazing land. This map is available, I could show it to you. But this month ushers 93 years of death and destruction and destitution of the people of Palestine, resulting from Balfour Declaration, the promise of those who do not own to those who have no title. Yet while al-Alimbi was fighting in Palestine, he has not yet finished conquering Palestine. Hayyim Waizman, on behalf of the fledgling Zionist movement, went over to Balfour and asked him to make a survey of every acre of Palestine. Why? He said to verify the ownership of every single acre of Palestine with the understanding that if it is not verified or is in doubtful or there are no documents, it will be taken over by the mandate and given over to the Jews. So here then, the survey of Palestine was created specially to find out how much land the Zionists could take of Palestine. And that was done even before the mandate was established legally and before even Alembi, as I said, completes his conquest of Palestine. And Haim Wiseman appointed a trusted Zionist official to help him in this endeavor. And this trusted official, Zionist official, two years later became the first British mandate High Commissioner of Palestine. He appointed Herbert Samuel as his advisor. before he was appointed officially by the British government as the neutral administrator of Palestine to bring Palestine to freedom, according to Article 22 of the League of Nations. The colonial powers intended to create spheres of influence and to utilize natural resources and, of course, to use the cheap labor of the colonies. But Zionism has totally different objectives. It has three of them. One is to occupy and confiscate the land of Palestine. That's number one. Number two, to expel its population, who they say they don't exist, but they are a population of 1,000 towns and villages, to expel them and to dispossess them. The third one, of which the Atlas is the subject, is to erase their memory, their records, and their trace from history totally. So this third objective has received, of course, very little attention. You must remember that exactly in the week when Ben-Gurion finished expelling the last Palestinian village in 1949, he set up a committee of about two dozen people of Old Testament scholars and geographers and so on, and told them to erase everything about Palestine and to create a new map with Hebraic names. The atlas, of course, we have produced tries to address this not only from 1917 but also during the mandate and during the first 18 years of establishing Israel. How did they destroy the landscape of Palestine and how they confiscated this property other than expelling the population? So here we have this slide. This is, of course, the Palestine which Alembi found when he came to Palestine. You can see it's a country with variable terrain, fertile coastal plain, cultivated mountains in the middle, and Al-Ghor deep below sea level. It is the home of Palestinians over several millennia. And you push this. And this land of course sustained the people of Palestine for many centuries because they have so many wells and so many springs and so many water resources. So it is not a desert and it is not a land without people. After 30 years of British Mandate, the Jewish population increased from 9% of Palestine, the total population, to 30% of the total population under the aegis of the British Mandate. Here are all the water sources of Palestine. And now this Palestine with very little, a very small Jewish minority, they managed under the British occupation, the British mandate to acquire 5.5% of the area of Palestine. That's what they have acquired until 1948. They started from 2% during the Turkish times to 5.5%. And then in the end of the mandate, The matter was brought to the United Nations and the partition plan was proposed from which those who own 5% of Palestine were given 55% of Palestine, 11 times. And the people of the land had only 45%. As you know, the partition plan is only a recommendation between two parties. It's only enforceable if they agree to it. And of course, the Palestinians would not willingly surrender that much of their land. So Israel took over 78% of Palestine. The dark areas are 24% of Palestine, over and above what the partition plan proposed to them. Now, the occupation of Palestine took place according to this map. There has been 31... military operations, and they took over Palestine in a space of several months. As a result of that, 675,000 villages of Palestine were depopulated. This could not have been done, of course, except by military force. And of the 30 military operations in Palestine, they were associated with 77 massacres. at the average of two massacres per military operation. The first one took place at the beginning of the operation and the other one somewhere in the middle of the operation in order to propel people, propel people to leave their country with the simple possibility saying either you leave or you die. Now, when we look at the history of al-Nakba, we really must examine the anatomy of how it took place. how it took place, because this answers many of the contentious put forward ad nauseum by the Zionists, and they are all false. The first one is, if you look at the number of villages which have been depopulated before 15 May 1948, in other words, before the establishment of the State of Israel, you would see starting facts. First one is that the Israelis, while the British were there, supposedly to protect the Palestinians, expelled half of the total refugees. Half of the total refugees were expelled before any Arab regular soldier set foot in Palestine in order to rescue the Palestinians. There were demonstrations in Cairo and Baghdad and Beirut when Dariya was seen, and half of the 77 massacres took place. And so the Arab governments were forced reluctantly to send forces to protect the Palestinians. Now, by the time the state of Israel was established, as I said, half the population were expelled. And the other half was expelled in the following months. If you look at this diagram, you will see a number of interesting facts. First of all, when there was, we can actually superimpose on that, the Israeli military operations, the green ones. The yellow one is the truce. During the military operations, people were forced to leave. There is direct correlation between the incidents of the military operations and the expulsion of population. When there was no fighting, when there was truce, nobody left. Then the refugees did not leave upon Arab orders. They did not leave of their own free will. If they wanted to do that, they would have a good opportunity to do that when there was a lull in the fighting, when there is a truce. But nobody left during that time. So all the expulsion, all the depopulation was directly correlated to the incidence of the military operations. And in order to prove that more, we can see the incidence of massacres. They always coincided with the Israeli military operations one by one. And when there were no massacres, and when there were no fighting, nobody left. So this really put to rest many of the myths created by the Israelis that they left on their own, that we asked them to stay but they didn't want to stay, and so on and so forth. Here we have the incidence of the massacres. You can see most of them are related to the corridor between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and Haifa. The typical case, of course, of a massacre was, or occupation of a village, was to surround it from these sides, leaving one side open to the north, to Lebanon, or to the east, to Jordan, or to southern Gaza. And then the young people, men, all are collected in one place and the women in another place. The women's jewelry was taken off them. They were sent over to the nearest Arab lines. And the men, there was usually a massacre in the village from 20 victims to about 200 victims. And then the rest were taken to something you never heard about before. And I will tell you about it. They were taken to forced labor camps. So in summary, the Nakba, what we call a Nakba, people lived in over 1,000 towns and villages. Then they were depopulated from them in the Nakba. Those are the people who lived in the village in the north. And life was extinguished in 675,000 villages. And then they are now in refugee camps in what's left of Palestine and in the neighboring countries. So this is al-Nakba, which I'm sure many of you know about very well. The direction, of course, of the expulsion, as I said just a moment ago, followed this pattern to north Syria and Lebanon, east Jordan, West Bank, and south to Gaza. Now, when this took place, Israel was announced in 15th, 14th actually of May 1948. By this time, it only occupied 11% of the area of Palestine. So when it went over to 78% of Palestine, that's all extra over the date on which Israel was established. It took 78% of Palestine. Now, the grabbing of land is of course a fundamental principle of Zionism. They wanted to create a state and they want to expel the people and plant the state in their place. So, the grabbing of land is a constant element of the Zionist practices. Here is the map of Gaza. We know the Gaza Strip is a crowded place. Why is it a crowded place? Because it is where the people from 247 villages in the south have been herded into this place, Gaza Strip, which has the area of 1% of Palestine. 1%. The remaining part of Palestine is 1%, Gaza Strip. But that's not all. The armistice line, which was signed on the 24th of February 1949, is this red line. What you do not know is that through coercion and through deception with the King Farouk government of Egypt, they agreed on a temporary line on the armistice line, which is this line, the blue line. They called it Modus Vivendi Agreement, signed one year later after the original armistice agreement. And from that, they chopped 200 square kilometers of Gaza Strip. It was 555 kilometers, with this blue line is 362 kilometers. And the idea was, this line is temporary line to make the border quiet. But this line became permanent. And you don't see it anymore on maps, the red line, the original one, the correct one. You don't see it. You don't see it, but you see the blue line, and therefore this area was taken by Israel on the understanding that it will be returned after the situation will cool down two, three years' time. By 1956, with the Suez War, it became permanent, and nobody ever bothered to discuss this. So this is not the only case where grabbing took place even after the hostilities finished in 1949. Here is another case in the West Bank. Here you see the line of the military Israeli forces, the extent of their conquest until 2nd of April 1949. They coerced King Abdullah. They threatened him. They will take over the whole West Bank if he doesn't give them a bit of the West Bank to divide it between them. So he had to agree to this line. and this yellow area, the people in this yellow area called Muthallaf, suddenly found themselves under the jurisdiction of Israel. This is by sheer threat, by military threat. But of course the Israelis were not happy by this arrangement because one of the people who live in this yellow area is a man who the Israelis loathe very much and they imprisoned him so many times. He is the defender of Al-Aqsa Mosque. His name is Ra'id Salah. Ra'id Salah comes from Umm al-Fahm, which happened to be in this area. The grabbing, of course, is continuous. That's what I'm saying. I mean, if you really see this argument, not only after the 1949 and the Armistice Line, you see it now in the West Bank and the settlements in Jerusalem. You see it in Al-Araqeeb in Beersheba. So this process of grabbing more land is never stopped. It is not a single event. Here is the case how they created the armistice line around Jerusalem. First they agreed with the officers of Glob Basha of Jordan and Moshe Dayan on a line like this. And then they said this line is no good for us because here, below the green line, the railway from Jerusalem to Jaffa goes along this area and they wanted it. So they created a new line which took over the villages of Walaja and Bessafafa and the railway line and Latrun area. That also took place after the hostilities went over. This, as a result of all this, We have 111 villages in the West Bank and Gaza which has been dissected by this armistice line. As you know, it's cut into half because of armistice line. And now, of course, the settlement in the West Bank went over that. But I'll show you something else. Now we are talking about 48 and 49 and 50 and maybe 70. Now I'll tell you something about 1994. This process never stopped. This map is part of the peace treaty agreement between Jordan and Israel in 1994. They said that they have an exchange of land between Israel and Jordan, meaning that Israel would like to take more of Jordanian land, and Jordan will be compensated, theoretically as you'll see, by pieces of land from Israel, i.e. from Palestine. But here is one glaring example of this. Here is the red line to the right. Sorry, the left is the boundary of Palestine during the British Mandate. When they finished negotiations over the agreement with Jordan, the Israelis took the blue area inside the Jordanian territory. But that's not all. They have taken this yellow area, farms extending into the Jordanian territory for five kilometers. So what? They have 14 wells and they pump off 15 million cubic meters of Jordanian water direct to Israel until now. And this area here is theoretically under the jurisdiction of Jordan, but nobody is allowed to go there. The Israelis can work and function and plant farms inside Jordan territory. and nobody can touch them. I took a taxi and drove along this road from Amman. I came to this point to explore it and take pictures of it. I was stopped at the green point here by a military post, Jordanian military post, not allowed to go further. And so on and on and on. So therefore, as I keep saying, the military conquest of Palestine has never stopped, even today and tomorrow if we let them. Now I would like to tell you a little bit about what happened to the empty Palestine which is left behind. What did they do with it? suddenly Palestine is empty. And of course, you have 14 cities which are emptied of its population. You have about 600 villages emptied. And Ben-Gurion was anxious to bring in as many Jews as possible to fill the void. But before he did that, they entered into several phases of the destruction of Palestinian landscape. The first one is there was massive looting of the main Palestinian cities in Jaffa, Lydda and Ramla, in Jerusalem and Haifa. Massive hysteria of looting. These are not my words. These are the words of the Israeli writer Moshe Szymanski. He said hysteria, mass hysteria of Jews descending on Palestinian territories. homes, ripping of everything, taking everything which he carried, everything they can carry, they carried out, including the tiles, including the doors. They ripped the tiles from their place. They took pumps in Bayara, which is a farm, and so on. Huge, massive looting. Who did that? several groups. The first group of looters are the kibbutzniks who live next to an Arab town. They are the first to descend on them. The second group of looters were the army officers who, after finished occupying a village, turned down with their trucks and tanks back to the village or the town and filled their trucks with the loot. From Lida alone, Battalion 5 of the Israeli army filled 1,800 trucks. Ben-Gurion said, this is untold wealth. We really must preserve it. And the third group of looters were the high members of the ruling party. They all fought among themselves among the best Jerusalem houses, Mapai at the time, and they picked the best villas in Jerusalem to take over. The next group of looters are the businessmen who sat together in Haifa and decided among themselves who will take the Palestinian factories, workshops, stores, businesses, and so on, and decided this among themselves. All this within the first 18 months of the establishment of Israel. We have now full documentation about that. But the biggest looter of all, which is even At the moment maintaining the loot is the Jewish National Fund. They took over all of the rest of Palestine together with Jewish Agency. Jewish Agency brought new immigrants to occupy the space and the Jewish National Fund until today They are controlling all the Palestinian land. Can you imagine a state anywhere in the world in which 93% of it doesn't belong to it? Israel is built on a land of which 93% is Palestinian. But then they started destruction of the villages. The first line of destruction was between Jerusalem and Jaffa and between Jaffa and Haifa. Why? They said very clearly, when visitors, foreign visitors who come to see our exploits, they will see the ruins of villages that will be, I quote, very embarrassing for us. So they started removing the debris from these villages in these areas. This followed by the area around River Jordan and Tiberias and around Gaza because Gaza is a huge concentration camp and they did not want people to be tempted to go back to their homes. But then came something else. Someone said, you are destroying these villages. There may be something in them we would like to keep. What is that? They said, we want proof of Jewish history in Palestine. And all these villages are very ancient. So they established what is called the Israel Archaeological Survey, and they from 1960 onwards, started to be given a list of villages to be destroyed. And they went to these villages, and they ordered the destruction of the villages of every archaeological remains, whether it's Byzantine, Roman, Islamic, Arabic, Mamluk, Turkish, of any kind to be destroyed, except if it has something to do with Jewish history or something can be claimed to Jewish history. The maps I'm showing you here, the squares here, are the work of the archaeological Israeli survey. They destroyed them. And the red dots, as you can see, are the villages which have been destroyed in accordance with that. Not only that. Not only Palestinians have lost their land, but the humanity have lost great treasure of history. As you know, Palestine is a historical place. So it has the history which is so valuable that probably no other place in the world can match it. We are fortunate in finding a book by the Bishop of Caesarea in the year 313. 313. Bishop Eusebius, Pamphili Eusebius. He wrote a book called in all Latin Greek, in order Greek and Latin, enumerating Palestinian villages and towns, giving their names, their population, their distance between themselves, between each other. Of course, distances were measured by a horse, how many days or hours of a horse. And we have that. Luckily, in London, we managed to find our translation in English was done only three, four years ago. So we said, simple question. Let us look at this map almost 2,000 years ago and see the modern map, meaning Palestine mandate map, and see what happened to these villages. This is the result we have. Here are the towns. or villages, and here are other historical places. All these places are found in the bishop's book in 313. All of these places are found in our maps of the British Mandate. And all what you see here, 139, have been destroyed by Israel. Therefore, Israel destroyed 139 villages 2,000 years old. 2000 years old. This is lost forever. Of course what's remaining in Palestine are not these. I only showed the ones they have destroyed. That's what they have done. Where is UNESCO about that? Where is the word of people who claim civilization is the property of all mankind? Where is that? None of them speak about that. They call about the victory of civilization in Palestine against backward people or the divine intervention which gave the miracle of creating Israel. That's what the miracle of creating Israel is. Here is one typical example. This is the town of Tiberius. The town of Tiberius is very old. It is built before the emperor Tiberius in the Roman time. It's named after him. But it's built before that. The yellow area is the old city of Tiberius, which is completely destroyed by the Israelis a few months after it was captured in April 1948. In that location, monuments of lion relief in stone, 3,500 years old, was destroyed. 3,500 years old relief stone in Tiberias was destroyed. And who told me about this? Some Israeli archaeologists who in this age are brave enough to write about them. You know, of course, what the GNF have done. They have stolen 2.5 million dunams in a fictitious deal in 1948. And they built on them what visitors to Israel are told, parks, environmental agency. GNF parades itself as charitable environmental agency. And all these parks... are all built on stolen land. And these are the parts built on them. Every one of them, you know that's built on the land of a Palestinian village. If you know a name like Herzl Park or Balfour Park, it is in honor, the word used loosely, in honor of the Western politicians who supported the destruction of Palestine. So in the end, of course, you know the story. The Palestinians now are 11 million people, but 88% of them are still around Palestine and on Palestine itself. Only 12% are outside Palestine. We, of course, always plan for the return home. No question about that. Your home for so many thousands of years, you cannot forget it. You can actually see it. In order to do that, we have to know who the refugees are, where they are, and so on. Luckily, we have a database which tells us a lot of things. For example, we know where the exile maps of any Palestinian village. Here is the village of Al-Jiyah, and the blue areas are where the population of this village are now exiled. know the village of Beit Mahsir west of Jerusalem where the people are today. We also know the people from Safaria and Galilee, where they are today. We can do the reverse. We can answer the question, people in any refugee camp in Jordan or Syria, where did they come from? We know their names. We know their family structure. We know who the father and mother is. We know their land. We know where they come from. We know their mosque in Palestine. We have all this data thanks to the computers. We also know everything about 1,200 Israeli towns today. We know where they came from, whether they come from Russia or old Ashkenazis or Arab Jews or, um, or, um, miscellaneous Europeans. We know the whole structure about that. Uh, so we ask the question, which we have tried to answer many years ago, but now we answer, we try to answer it very clearly. If people return Do they come across any Israeli urban construction? Can they find the location of their village or not? We found this map detailing everything. All this, of course, is taken from the Atlas. And we find there are only 25 villages out of 560 which are completely built over by Israel, naturally, in the expansion of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and Haifa. The rest is open. Open. No question about that. We also tried to ask, what is the population density of the Jews in Palestine? And as you can see, it's very clear for you, the details are in the Atlas, that 84% of Jews, Israeli Jews, live in 17% of Palestine, of Israel only. Remember, 84%. of the whole Israeli Jews who came to occupy Palestine live only in 17% of Israel. A tiny percentage. The rest is used for the army and the kibbutz. So, as I said a moment ago, if we bring back the refugees, what can we do? This is the northern district. These are the existing population, whether Russians or Ashkenazis and so on, for every single Israeli locality. We know who they are. If you bring back the refugees to their homes, they have no problem whatsoever because they will be retained, they will be 800,000, but they will be met in Galilee by half a million Palestinians who are the other half of the families which had been dismembered in 1948. Their kith and kin will be waiting for them. And of course, in the southern district in Gaza, the situation is much, much simpler because all the rural Jews in the south are less than the size of a single refugee camp in Gaza. So when the refugees return from Gaza, they find nobody in their face. Their places are empty. All right. So we then come to to the conclusion by bringing to your attention two observations. These are the indices, the names we entered in the Atlas. 40,000 names. 40,000 names. Names of villages, known places, names of historical sites, names of everything. So the history of Palestinians is recorded not only in maps, it's also recorded in the place names. The names which we have gathered are an entirely magnificent treasure of history, of information, and of ownership. Palestinians don't need to have title deeds and so on. They just need to, anybody needs to see how they carve these 40,000 names. These names honor family. They call, they are referred to Abu, Um, Ibn, Bint, almost 3,000 times. They also indicate ownership. Ali Garden, Hussein Field. They indicate planted fields. What kind of plantation? Olives, grapes, figs. They indicate places where animals are common. Place where horses, camels, gazelles, wolves, foxes, or places relate to birds. Hamam, pigeon, falcon. They indicate the color of the soil. red, yellow. They indicate terrain. All these names describe that, the written terrain, tell, cliff, meadow. They indicate also wells, springs, and ponds. They indicate trades, like pottery factory, grapes press, wind or water mill. They indicate the background of the farmer, Akkawi, Ghazawi, Durzi, Nasrani. They indicate the relative location of two villages, upper, lower, in between. They indicate special events like the horse's birthplace, like the killing site of the chief, like the hanging site, like the battle scene. They indicate also strange names people created, such as going up and down, tala nazil, the good name, tayyibat al ism, good morning, sabah al khair, the morning star, najmat al subh, shield protector, haami khursu, wolf's face, wajh al dhib, dog's tail, damb al kalb. All these 40,000 names are the vocabulary of the social history of Palestine over thousands of years. No single person created them. No somebody crafted names in a closed room. They represent their life, the names created by them, for their recognition and use. It was their life etched in their use in speech. And that is what Ben-Gurion wanted to destroy in July 1949, when he said, erase all these names. I bet he turns in his grave when he looks at the Atlas today. So what did he do instead? He created the official Israeli Gazette, which produced after Ardua's work. They created only 6,800 names. What happened to 33,000 names missing? We have 40,000 names. They don't have them. They don't have them because they don't have the record of belonging to the land. They don't have the record of living with the land, planting it, describing its terrain, creating its history from the names of the places. They don't have that. If you ask an Israeli today, if you ask a Palestinian, where do you live? You say, I live next to Ali Garden, next to Wadi al-Hammam. the Pigeon's Valley, not far from Mary's Wells, Ain al-Azra, and so on. You ask an Israeli, where do you live? You say, apartment 18, Bangoran Street, number 5. No relation to the land. No relation. With this place names, we don't need any other evidence that Palestine is lived in and owned by the people of Palestine. One last point about what the Zionists did. Ben-Gurion said that, oh, the old will die and the young will forget. Well, the old did die, but not before they told their children about their heritage. And the young, if they, with the father, went over to Palestine, to their land, they would be shot. They will be shot on the spot as infiltrators. Of course, I don't need to tell you the irony about who infiltrated the shores of Palestine from smuggled ships in 1947. Who is the infiltrator of Palestine? It is the person who is returning to his land or the people who came in ships in the darkness of night on the shores of Palestine wading into its water. So we have a present today. for the father and his son. We will show him his land which he could not show to his son. We will rent a helicopter and the father and son will ride in this helicopter and show him the land where he lived in from which he was expelled. Can you see this? Very short video, but it's taken from 5,000 aerial photographs of Palestine. And they recreate, thanks to technology, recreate the Palestine which the father can now show to his son. Here's the video. We start from Dimra. Dimra is the place where the Eretz crossing was created. Now, here is the village of Dimra destroyed and Eretz built on it. Then we have the village of Deresneid. You can see the fields here. The place called Almas Al-Udiya, Al-Habil, Al-Mawassal. We then turn. Helicopter has a good way of turning and going up and down. We can actually create the height how we can fly over Palestine. And then Al-Hadab. And here you'll see another village soon. Karm al-Sharif. And then all these fields are here on the right. Barbara, a village destroyed, of course. And then we turn slightly to the left and see Algia. Here's village of Algia and its fields. We turn around and then we go to the Mediterranean, see the sand dunes here. And then we see Na'lia, the white area in sand dunes. And then we see a small village called Al-Khsas. Mediterranean in the background. And then we go to the village of Asqalan, old Asqalan, very ancient, named Al-Jura. Asqalan, here is the Mediterranean. Asqalan, destroyed also. There is a monument here, 11th century, destroyed by Moshe Dayan himself. And here we go to Al Majdal, Al Majdal, an important town on the Gaza Haifa Highway. Here is Al Majdal. And so the father can then show his son. As I started with the story about the defaced monuments, we realize that truth may be hidden or distorted, but it always have a way of coming back. It does not die easily. So is justice. Justice has a long life. If destroyed or burnt into ashes, it rises again from the ashes like the phoenix. To haunt the murderer and the robber and the unjust and to tell the victim that your rights will be restored to you. I'm sure truth will shine again and as a believer in the human spirit, which refuses to surrender, I am sure that Palestinians will surely win and achieve the most basic of human rights to return home. Thank you very much.

Rama: We are incredibly excited and honored to have Dr. Salman Abu Sitta with us today. Dr. Salman Abu Sitta is the founder and president of the Palestine Land Society in London. The Palestine Land Society is an organization dedicated to the documentation of Palestine's land and people. Many of you know Dr. Salman Abu Sitta's work, especially for his groundbreaking work of actually mapping out the return of Palestinians to historic Palestine. He is also the author of six books on Palestine, including the Atlas of Palestine from 1917 to 1966, published in both English and Arabic. as well as the Atlas of the Return Journey. He's also published 300 papers and articles on on Palestinian refugees, the right of return, and the history of the Nakba and human rights. In 2016, he published a memoir titled Mapping My Return, in which he describes his life in Palestine and his long struggle as a refugee to return home. So with that, I'll pass it on to you, Doktor, to speak about the Nakba and the right of return and share more about your work with us.

Salman Abu Sitta: Thank you Rama, thank you. It's a very sad day that we remember Nakba. It's now 25,000 days since we left our home or expelled from our homes. It's a sad day. But it's also, it's a happy day for me because today I see the young people are remembering Palestine, working for Palestine, working for return. Those young people who were dismissed by the Zionist leader, David Ben-Gurion, when he said the young will forget. Well, the young did not forget. The young are all over the world and they are spreading the word about Palestine. I sometimes feel ashamed of the generation we live in because the future generation will read in their history books that we lost Palestine and the Zionists took over Palestine. But what really gives me great hope is that this event, although it is the most tragic event in the history of Palestine, really the most tragic event in 4,000 years of history. It is unprecedented in even in any colonial history. All the colonial projects they passed were done 200 years ago or more. They sailed in sailing ships and they carried swords and arrows and all that. But in our case, Palestine was taken away from us under the shadow of the United Nations, when we have telephones, telegraphs, we have New York Times, we have communications, how could that happen? How could this unusual event happens? At a time in the middle of the 20th century, when all the colonial soldiers of Europe packed their bags and left Asia and Africa going back to Europe, we are confronted with a new army from Europe of settlers from Russia and Poland marching in the opposite direction towards Palestine. They took it by force, by real force. 120,000 soldiers in nine brigades in 31 military operations depopulated 560,000 villages. And that, of course, could not have happened just like that. It was propelled by over 60 massacres in villages at the rate of two massacres per each one of 31 military operations. There is absolutely nothing like it. How could the world, which has now communications, how could it really accept that? How could every article of the international law have been violated, crushed, and thrown in dust by Israel and its supporters. How could that happen? One reason how it happened, that the Israeli conquest of Palestine was associated with a large wave of deceptions. Deception which could be known to Europe, but they chose to ignore it. One deception is that Palestine is a land without people. When I look at the history of 19th century, I'm amazed at that. And the Paris Conference in 1919, European colonial powers accepted that because they endorsed Balfour Declaration. But when I looked again at this myth that Palestine is a land without people, it dawned on me that they knew it was not a myth. They deliberately know that it is not a myth. then what is it? It was actually a plan. A plan to make Palestine without people. In other words, it was a plan to apply ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians in Palestine. So it is a plan. So that's one deception. The other deception, when they say, why are you in Palestine? We were defending ourselves. We are in a state of... self-defense against the Arab invasion. You hear that in the United States in many books. This is a lie because the actual invasion was the Zionist invasion. The Zionist invasion started from 1st of April 1948 to 14th of May 1948 when all the Haganah army, which became Israel army later, descended on Palestine and depopulated 220,000 villages, the most important towns in Palestine, including Haifa, Jaffa, and Tiberias. And they actually depopulated all these towns and villages from their homes. They are today making total of half of all refugees of today and that happened when it was happened under we were supposed to be under their protection of the british mandate the british did not leave them and that happened not by a country called israel it was not established then it was done by the hagana And it was not in self-defense because no Arab soldier, regular Arab soldiers enter Palestine by them. So this is one deception, which is now very common in the Zionist literature. The other deception is they say we established Palestine, Israel on the strength of the partition plan of 1947. Well, first of all, that resolution is not mandatory. It was only a mere suggestion. And because the United Nations says we have no authority to divide countries between people, we only suggest. And in 16th of March, 1948, the United Nations itself dropped the partition plan. And so did the United States. And they wanted to put Palestine under UN trustee ship. So the, Legal threat by which Ben-Gurion wanted to hang establishment of his state is gone. It has no value whatsoever. Then they say the refugees actually left on their own. Well, probably they left to have a holiday in the Riviera. And of course this is rubbish because they were propelled by massacres and every step of the way by all kinds of terrorism. And Their departure, if it was by their choice or if it was not by the action of the Israelis, they would have been allowed to return when the hostilities ended, but they were not allowed to return. Instead, their towns and villages were demolished and their wells from which they drank were poisoned and all their documents have been stolen so it was an orgy of death and destruction by Israel for Palestinians and then they tell you that well they cannot return now because the country is full and there is no place for them I'll come back to this point later Now, when you actually look at history, whether old or new, you wonder how could this happen in such a way? All the colonial projects in the past have had limited action by their enemies, like military conquest, like this and that. And for example, British in India or the French in Algeria and so on. The Zionists waged upon the Palestinians something unprecedented in history. They waged against us 10 kinds of wars, 10 kinds of wars. The first war is the military one by which they occupied the land. We know that. But the second war, it was silencing the voice of the victim. We were not allowed to speak. If we spoke about massacres, expulsion and so on, we were not allowed to say that. Our voice was silenced. The third war against us was political. When there is a great deal of international law on our side, the Western countries supporting Israel actually vetoed the international law. They muted the international law and therefore they waged against us a political war by which the international law was not allowed to come to our help. The fourth war against us is geographical. They wiped out 55 000 names in palestine and they replaced them by 6 800 created names pretending that there is no palestine and there is israel represented by these created names the fifth war against us was historical Today in Israel, the history of the world between Jesus Christ and the First World War is zero, empty, blank pages. There is no Palestinians, whether Byzantium or Christian or Islamic or anything like that. It's blank. So the history has stopped operating for 2000 years until the Russian and Polish settlers came to Palestine. The sixth war is archeological. Every trace of our history is removed. And this is not just a general statement. I have traced the method by which the Israelis demolished 500 villages. They carried with them not only tractors and destroyers and things, they carried with them archeological team. they look at each stone if they see there's some value in it they keep it otherwise they destroy it they destroyed byzantine history islamic history christian history and all that So the eighth war is defamation. People now who speak on behalf of Palestinians, whether Palestinians or Europeans or Americans or something, they are defamed, even if they were UN officials. They are saying that you are anti-Semite, the weapon which is used against them. The ninth war is actually the legal war against us. This is called warfare. Now with the rise of the BDS, in many countries and many states in the United States, and certainly in Germany, there are laws which criminalize those who speak about the injustice in Palestine. The 10th war, which is the final one, is economic. Not only it has been used during the British mandate to create foothold for the Jewish settlers, but now the war against Gaza, which is a blockade, which is actually called incremental genocide, is one supreme example of that. And of course, the restrictions on the West Bank. So these ten wars weighed against us. Not only they show that we have been fighting A long war and many of these wars have not succeeded, but it just tells you it's an answer to a simple question. Why would people go to such length to wage 10 wars against people who have no tanks and no airplanes? The reason is the Israeli narrative is going against the grain of geography and history and truth and international law. They wanted to create a fictitious structure And of course, this will not happen. Now, I would like to say back again to the young people. The young people have the banner of the future in their hands. When people say we have been 70 years since Nakba, some people say, well, what can we do? We should really probably accept that. No, I derive from this the opposite story. I say that 72 years, the Zionists are trying to force us to give them the title deed to sign that Palestine is not our land. and that it is israel they failed and they continue to the fail as long as they don't have legitimacy from us that our palestine is their israel they will not succeed and here i rely very much on the young people young people today are 75 percent of the palestinian population people say that they forget who did not forget you You in Europe and America did not forget. You could have easily had a good life and say we forget about Palestine. But when I see the list on your screen of so many tens of societies who are remembering al-Nakba and fighting for eternal liberation, I feel joy in my heart. And I have never given up on that. How do I do that? We have established in London 20 years ago, Palestine led society to document Palestine and document it not only for the sake of history, not only for the sake of rebuttal of the false Zionist narrative, but actually to plan the return. We have the right for return. Right of return is sacred, legal, possible, and inevitable. So we don't dream about return. We actually plan for it. The first thing we have done is we have now a huge database of all the Palestinian refugees, or to be more accurate, most of Palestinian refugees. And these, we know who they are. We know their names. We know where they come from. We know their property in Palestine. We know also where they live and which refugee camp. We then can, with a click on our computer, identify anyone anywhere. Then next step said, we said, since the whole world is in favor of the right of return, supporting resolution 194, 135 times so far, then we have to plan how physically, how it could be implemented. So we planned a network of roads from the camps to their places of origin. And we can calculate how long it takes, how many kilometers, even how many buses we can have to do that. But this is not enough. We then made a study of every village land in Palestine now occupied by Israel. Who lives in their land? Who lives in that land? When people return, what Or who will they find in their land? We discovered some 15 years ago a very startling discovery that Palestine of 1948 is still empty. Yes, it is empty. How is it empty? 87% of Israeli Jews still live in 12% of Israel, roughly the same area they lived during the British Mandate. expanded a little bit outside. And all the other lands, for example, we have 247 village lands. They have no Jews at all today. And the rest are dotted with kibbutz and mushav. Why? Because the kibbutz and mushav are actually planted to prevent the return of the refugees. They constitute, all of them, one to 2% of Israeli Jews. Take the example of Gaza, for example. Everybody say it's very crowded. We don't tell you why it is crowded. It is crowded because 247 villages in Southern Palestine living in 50% of Palestine have been crammed by the Israeli ethnic cleansing into Gaza Strip which has an area of 1.3% of Palestine. Imagine 50% of Palestine is squashed into 1% and their density of population are 7 000 persons per square kilometer now who took their land settlers just to the east across the barbed wire their density is only seven persons per square kilometer one thousand times less if we exchange places um the settlers and the refugees refugees are staying home and the settlers in their land were put in refugee camps in Gaza, they hardly fill half a refugee camp in Gaza today. So the injustice is immeasurable. But we went one step further and we said, since actually there is no obstacle in Palestinian refugees returning, why don't we encourage young people to reconstruct their own villages? So we started four years ago a competition among architecture students in the graduating class. We gave them a list of villages, they choose one, and then they design the new village of their family. Usually they select a village where their grandfather came from. And we give them data to help them to do that. One of them is that our population is now 10 times more. We also tell them that you'll have internet, you have this and that. Instead of one small school, you'd have about four, five, six schools, and so on. And really, I am amazed how creative these young people, like you today, are. their designs are wonderful every year in september we gather a very distinguished group of architects from britain germany ireland and arab countries and they judge the entries from 10 universities and you have no idea how they impress those even western judges for example um young woman from Hula village. She chose her grandfather's house. We gave her a picture of it from aerial survey and she worked around the village and she had a wonderful scheme about that. So what I want now to conclude by saying we are not dreaming about the right of return. We are actually planning for it. And you should carry the banner. Your first requirement is never, ever, never, ever give up your right of return. That is what the Zionists want so badly. They want your signature. If you sign out your right in Palestine, you do, I hope it never happens, a crime to your children and children's children. Never do that. Our legitimacy is in our hand. Nobody can take it away from us. And the second thing is what you should do is like this meeting today. You have to study your history, your village, your country. the geography of Palestine, you have to live it in your mind and your heart. We have several atlases. One of them is called Return Journey, in which you can go to your place in Palestine. It shows two layers of information. One of them is what Palestine was and what it is today. Here is the map shown on the screen. All the green areas you can see here are village lands which are free, almost free of Jews. The blue area you see now is the land in which Jews lived during the British Mandate and where they are mostly now here. Next one, you have that. Ah, the brown areas are the city's land, just to show you the location of the cities. And if you see the black dots on the coast, it is the only place in Palestine where the Jews are majority over Palestinians after 1948. Next one. Next one, if you can. Yes, here I show the concentration of Jews today in Israel. You can see they are in only three areas. One around Tel Aviv and Jaffa and up north in Haifa and in Western Jerusalem. That is where they are today. So we ask next question, click please. You can see now red dots Coming up red dots. Yes, these red dots are the depopulated villages which are now in exile. You can see they can return to their land without interference with existing Jewish Israelis. I say this because Europeans say you are going to create an akba for Jews. This is the work of Arwa, Arwa Khalalwa. This is her house of her grandfather. This is the present condition. It's now removed completely. That's Rola. And that is her design of the new village. She built it in modern way. It has very modern amenities. And her grandfather house is still preserved. And so this is her way. She got a prize for it. So I conclude by saying, keep up what you are doing. Multiply by 10 times more. Never, ever give up your right of return. Teach it to your children. Teach it to your friends and neighbors because truth always have a lasting value. It cannot diminish with time, provided the holder of the truth is always keeping it. And the young generation like you, not only they did not forget, but they will fight for the right of return. I'm sure they will do that no matter how long it takes. Good luck to you.